The Problem With Asian American Racial Privilege

February 5, 2014 1:30 am

If you do a google search of “Asian privilege” you’ll see that the subject is generating a lot of chatter, both on the right and the left. But, much of the online discussion concerning Asian privilege ignores a couple of really important things.

First, “race” is a political category, invented to serve the interests of white supremacy. Second, the Oriental “race” (what we were called before we became Asian)
was conceived of in this context. When you consider these facts, it
becomes clear that Asian privilege may be more complicated than we
imagine.

On the first point, race is neither biological nor cultural. In the words of Northwestern University Law Professor, Dorothy Roberts,
“Race is not a biological category that is politically charged. It is a
political category that has been disguised as a biological one.”

And politics has consequences. It is through our political system
that the rules of society are made, and by those rules that the wealth
of society is distributed.

So when we talk about Asian Americans, we’re talking about a
subjugated political category as much as we’re talking about the people
that category tries to contain. We aren’t all alike and don’t all fit
together. In fact, Asian America includes ethnic groups that are among
the most successful in terms of income, and groups that are among the
most unsuccessful by that same measure. Even most so-called Asians don’t
identify as such, preferring instead to identify by ethnicity.

Add the notion of privilege
to all of this and things get even more complicated. Why? Because
privilege doesn’t necessarily equate to real political power, and not
all privileges are racial. On the other hand, privileges that don’t
start out racial often get concentrated in ways that benefit certain
racial groups because of the very real political power of race.

Confused yet? Here’s what I mean.

Many Asian immigrants come to the U.S. on special visas that are
granted to those who have skills the U.S. is short on. For instance,
South Asian Americans include a disproportionate number of doctors,
specifically because the U.S. didn’t have enough doctors to serve the
new market for health care created by medicare and recruited them from
South Asia. Today, many Taiwanese are being recruited to address
shortages of workers qualified for high wage jobs in the tech sector.
This kind of targeted recruitment skews statistics concerning Asian
educational attainment and income upward, creating the impression that
Asian Americans as a whole have a racial advantage that results in a
disproportionate number of us becoming doctors and other high wage
workers.

But the first wave of South Asian doctors, like the current wave of
Taiwanese tech workers, weren’t educated in the U.S., and not all Asians
come here on special visas. Some of us arrive as impoverished undocumented
immigrants, and others as war refugees. The apparent race privilege
indicated by the median incomes and educational levels of Asians overall
is about as relevant to these groups as the high median family income
of whites is to white people living in the abandoned coal camps of
Appalachia.

Moreover, while special visas are certainly a form of privilege,
Asians aren’t getting them because they’re Asian. They’re getting them
because they have skills U.S. industries aren’t finding enough of at
home. There’s a difference.

But the privilege of getting a special visa is undeniable. And in a
society organized by race, concentrating that privilege among some
Asians makes a difference to all of us because it contributes to the
stereotype of Asians as model workers and citizens. And, as dehumanizing
as it may be, this kind of model minority stereotyping is a form of privilege in the context of racism, which is nothing more than the logic of race.

I know some Asian Americans are uncomfortable with that idea, but the
privilege of model minority stereotyping is made evident when you
consider the obvious disadvantage of being labeled a “problem” minority.
This disadvantage is represented in the racially skewed composition of our prisons and the widespread practice of targeting of black men for petty crimes like marijuana use
that are committed just as frequently by whites, who also present the
problem of constituting a much larger percentage of the illegal
marijuana market.

That privilege may not benefit us all equally, but even white
privilege doesn’t benefit all white people equally (I again offer those
white Appalachians for your consideration). People with the power to
confer privilege tend to do so in order to concentrate benefits for
themselves, so most of what is gained through racial stereotyping isn’t
really being spread around, and even to the extent that it is, the
distribution is hardly even. Moreover, in the case of Asian Americans,
that privilege is conferred upon us by whites, making Asian privilege a
form of conditional white privilege.

So, as we argue over Asian privilege, we should keep in mind that Asian
is less effective as a descriptor of people as it is of a political
category created to serve the interests of white supremacy. And because
the Asian political category is a subjugated one by definition, just
like special visas granted to address labor shortages, Asian privilege
can be revoked if we don’t play by the rules.

More than just a connect-the-dots documentation of the rise of the model minority myth, The Color of Success
succeeds at putting the myth in a much broader social and political
context, positioning the model minority as a critical, even necessary,
lever of white supremacy, resting upon and taking drawing its power from
the fulcrum of anti-black racism. What’s more, it succeeds at making
this history feel personal and present in contemporary social relations.
For me, a person who lived through or in the immediate aftermath of the
events documented in the book, The Color of Success felt like a piece of personal history.

During the 1960s, the formative years of my youth, model minority
myth making was so ubiquitous that nearly everyone around me, and most
especially Asian Americans, just accepted it as the truth. No doubt the
enthusiasm among many Asian Americans to accept model minority
stereotyping was a reflection of the fact that the menu of choices where
stereotypes were concerned appeared to be restricted to either “model minority” or “yellow peril.” And the stakes were high. The “yellow peril” stereotype had been used to justify wars in Korea and Vietnam, the mass internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, anti-communist persecution of Chinese Americans under the McCarran Act, and no small amount of racial exclusion and terrorism.

Growing up in Hawai’i only made matters worse. I didn’t just see the
telecasts from Vietnam on TV, I lived in the staging site for that war,
surrounded on all sides by military bases full of soldiers who looked at
us like we were every bit as much the enemy as the Viet Cong. Moreover,
winning statehood for Hawai’i’ in 1959, just a few years before I was
born, required no small amount of myth making concerning Hawai’i's
“Asiatic majority,” not to mention the intentional marginalization of
Native Hawaiians for whom statehood was yet another demoralizing chapter
in a centuries long history of illegal and near genocidal colonial
domination.

In order to assuage racist fears of a yellow peril takeover of
(white) American culture and politics, statehood advocates presented
Asian Hawai’i residents as bi-cultural brokers between east and west who
were, nonetheless, as American as pizza and chop suey, and ironically
equipped by our indelibly foreign cultures to be ideal Americans. The
contradictions, though obvious, were mostly ignored, not just by white
Americans but by many Asians.

The Color of Success provides a detailed account of where
all of that confusing, contradictory, and ultimately dehumanizing myth
making came from. It presents a critical swath of Asian American
history, from WWII through the 1970s, during which some Japanese and
Chinese American leaders tried to secure citizenship for members of
their communities by engaging in P.R. campaigns and sponsoring research
designed to convince the public that they, and by extension Asians in
general, were less prone to delinquency and promiscuity, and more
committed to family, education, and country than others by dint of
culture. Japanese Americans in particular were so successful in this
effort that by the 1980s, during the U.S.-Japan auto wars, the notion
that Japanese culture made adherents better, more industrious workers,
especially on mass production lines, inspired a craze for all things
Japanese, from ancient samurai codes to flower arranging.

But the model minority stereotype had a downside. The myth of the
model minority painted Asians as decidedly not black in the American
mind, inadvertently promoting the idea that blacks were Asian Americans’
opposites; a “problem minority,” spoiling the American dream by
refusing to simply ignore racism and quietly pull themselves up by their
bootstraps. Today, the myth is more popular than ever, and as important
to the reproduction of racial injustice in the 21st century as the 19th
century “rags to riches” novels of Horatio Alger
were to the suppression of dissent against extreme gilded age class
exploitation and 1% excesses in the beginning of the 20th century.

This book is a must-read for all who are interested in Asian American
history, critical race theory, and the roots of color blind racism in
the U.S.

You cannot post new topics in this forumYou cannot reply to topics in this forumYou cannot delete your posts in this forumYou cannot edit your posts in this forumYou cannot create polls in this forumYou cannot vote in polls in this forum